The present invention relates to a system and method for patient identification and clinical care verification. More particularly, the present invention relates to a patient identification system and method providing for accurate identification of a patient and for relating items to a patient and ensuring that patient specific items do properly correspond to a patient, thereby providing for accurate medical treatment, billing and inventory and cost control.
Medical institutions are faced with a competitive environment in which they must improve profitability and yet simultaneously improve patient care. There are several factors which contribute to the ever increasing costs of hospital care. For example, there is an ever increasing amount of paperwork required by nurses, pharmacists and laboratory personnel. In addition, inaccurate recording of drugs, supplies and tests involved in patient care results in decreasing revenues by a failure to fully capture billing opportunities of these actual costs. Inadequate management also results in a failure to provide an accurate report of all costs involved in treating a particular illness.
In most hospitals and clinical laboratories, a bracelet device containing the patient's name is permanently affixed around the arm of an incoming patient in order to identify the patient during his or her entire stay. Despite this, numerous situations arise which result in errors in patient identification.
For example, when a blood sample is taken from a patient, the blood sample must be identified by the name on the patient's bracelet In transferring the patient's name a nurse or technician may miscopy the name or may rely on memory or a different data source, rather than actually reading the patient's bracelet.
Moreover, the lack of accurate and rapid transfer of patient information often reduces the accuracy and/or effectiveness of drug administration and patient care, thereby increasing the duration of hospital stay.
In addition, hospitals and other institutions must continuously strive to provide quality patient care. Medical errors, where the wrong patient receives the wrong drug at the wrong time, in the wrong dosage or even the wrong surgery, are a significant problem for all health care facilities. Many prescription drugs and injections are identified merely by slips of paper on which the patient's name and identification number have been handwritten by a nurse or technician who is to administer the treatment. For a variety of reasons, such as the transfer of patients to different beds and errors in marking the slips of paper, a patient may be given an incorrect treatment.
Further, as health care facilities continue to decrease the number of staff personnel as a cost cutting measure, the possibility of personnel errors will most likely increase.
The present invention offers a system which solves or at least reduces the impact of the above-identified problems and other problems associated with health care facilities.